Today's Delancey Place: St. Thomas Aquinas coined the word prodigy and defined it as the offspring of a mating between a human and an animal. The article does not trace the circuitous route from that meaning to today's usage as an outstanding or precocious individual. Any guesses?

And by the way, the book from which the article is taken maintains that all of us are perverts somewhere along a sliding scale! Personally, I am not telling.

Slava wrote:Thomas Aquinas died in 1274. According to etymonline, the first recorded use of prodigy is from 1658.

That is the first recorded use of prodigy to mean "child with exceptional abilities", but etymonline gives the first recorded use in any sense as "late 15th century". That's still somewhat later than Aquinas, but he was an Italian writing in Latin, so it seems unlikely that he coined the English word! Perhaps he just took the existing Latin word prodigium, which can mean "a wonder" or "something extraordinary", and used it in a narrow, pejorative sense.

I note that some English dictionaries include "something abnormal or monstrous" among the meanings of "prodigy".